Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.

Either way

Take a knife or two to complete any tasks you need to finish soon. Reblog to give your mutuals a knife for any group projects you may be working on

This is because as a beginner, you have troubles because you don't have much knowledge.

But then you learn a bunch more, and now you've got the skills to do a bunch of stuff, so you run into a lot of problems because you're doing so much stuff, and only an expert could figure them out.

But then one day you are an expert. You can reprogram everything and build new hardware! You understand all the various layers of tech!

And your problems are now legendary. You are trying things no one else has ever tried. You Google them and get zero results, or at best one forum post from 1997. You discover bugs in the silicon of obscure processors. You crash your compiler. Your software gets cited in academic papers because you accidently discovered a new mathematical proof while trying to remote control a vibrator. You can't use the wifi on your main laptop because you wrote your own uefi implementation and Intel has a bug in their firmware that they haven't fixed yet, no matter how much you email them. You post on mastodon about your technical issue and the most common replies are names of psychiatric medications. You have written your own OS but there arent many programs for it because no one else understands how they have to write apps as a small federation of coroutine-based microservices. You ask for help and get Pagliacci'd, constantly.

Certified skydiving instructors know way more about safely falling from planes than I do, and are way more likely to die that way.

Today I got to meet his daughter and he insisted she meet Bug too, so after foot dips, I walked them out to the pens. I called for Bug several times, but she did not appear. I don't blame her. it's cold and rainy out. So I went in to find her, and she was absolutely not budging at all. Nestled up with mantis on their heated perch, inside their curtained-off, decorated, insulated coop. I did end up letting the daughter walk through to come see her and give her a little pat, because I want to get along with my neighbors and want them to like the birds (much easier all around if everyone likes the birds).

But like imagine it's the dead of winter in Michigan, and your elderly father insists that his new neighbor has peacocks and you go to see them thinking maybe they're turkeys, or like, one random peacock like some farms have, and instead this is what you find

And the reason being is that people (of all genders equally) perceive me as a threat otherwise.

Like

Threat vs not a threat

People have said before that they are concerned I’m gonna get them in trouble, but I think the real reason folks get mean is that tourists effectively enter a liminal space when they go on vacations (especially American tourists on tropical vacations) and they don’t want anything to pull them out of that mindset.

So when I show up with a clipboard and wanting to talk while wearing an outfit that clearly says “I’m working, but not in any sort of position that exists in your vacation fantasy,” that pulls them out of the fantasy and they react negatively.

Meanwhile, if I’m dressed the same way everyone else is, even if I have a clipboard and want to talk about the same thing, I automatically become a wacky NPC who is part of the fantasy.

Yes I study raccoons. The critically endangered pygmy raccoons like to live at beach clubs. My current study is looking at interactions between tourists and/or tourism industry staff and the raccoons.

So first of all this one girl told us about a newer metaphor in Russian, "I have paws", which is something you say when you don't really want to do something, so you say you're incapable of doing it since you have paws instead of hands. Like, "hey, finish that report" "aw but I have paws :(" and I think that's adorable. It's like "I'm just a girl" but for animals.

We also had the task to invent a novel metaphor and have the others guess what it means, and the teacher really liked my "she's such a capybara" = "everyone loves her". Capybara energy is like golden retriever energy except you're chill about it. You're just vibing and everyone digs that.

(someone said they wanted a rant, so they got a rant that is both here and on my website. Readmores are for cowards, hit J or start scrolling now. Here's the screenshot of the section headings on the site so you can get some idea of what you're getting into)

Introduction

Ida Auken's 2016 World Economic Forum essay on sustainable growth has been an easy target for fanatical right wing libertarians for almost a decade. In the brief though experiment, Auken considers how communal access to shared goods might improve an individual's life.

You wouldn't have to wrestle with the expense and storage woes of keeping a stand mixer in your kitchen because you could call for a stand mixer whenever you needed one. And it wouldn't really be your kitchen, it would be our kitchen in our city, used by someone who needed it when you weren't making dinner.

Auken touches on the idea that such a city couldn't be expected to have any kind of privacy, but the reader is left to wonder if the loss of privacy would be such a bad thing if you didn't have to pay for a car, or a house, or medical care - would you let people know all your actions throughout the day if it meant you didn't have to go to work to survive? The lack of privacy is clearly bad, but the liberty that comes with freedom from want is enticing.

It's precisely the kind of toothless futurist drivel you'd expect from the WEF, but it's frustrating to listen to the Alex Joneses and Tuckers Carlson of the world say "You'll own nothing, and you'll be happy" in saccharine voices to dismiss the concept of, like. School lunches.

I'm a big believer in the idea of tool libraries and communal ownership and the sharing economy and personal-not-private property and things that are free-like-speech-not-like-lunch and I've been irritated for years as I watch right libertarians aiming kicks at Auken's bland utopia.

Now it's a left libertarian's turn.

You can't participate in a sharing economy when the people you're sharing with are fucking landlords.

The problem with the essay is not its milquetoast paranoia about privacy, it is the presupposition that our world is not intractably captured by people who are burning us alive only because they cannot figure out how to make a dollar by hurling the earth into the sun.

The essay tells a truth but makes it a lie.

The truth: a better world IS possible.

The lie: that world will be delivered by automation and innovation trickling down from the top of society rather than by solidarity lifting up the bottom.

This is an essay about computers. And everything else.

EaaS-y Peasy

I edit photos in photoshop. I have edited photos in photoshop since 2002. Since 2012, I have edited photos in an educational perpetual edition of Creative Suite 6. The discs are sitting in the drawer beside my knee, I've installed them on four computers now, and when I get my next machine I will almost certainly connect it to an external disc reader and type in the product key code to install it again.

This is probably a violation of some sort of service agreement or another, and is absolutely a security risk, as is running all EoL and unpatched software.

But this is my software. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

I paid for it.

Except that I didn't. Even in 2012, I paid for a license to use the software, not the software itself. And the license was only active as long as the software was in support. And now that it is out of support, I am doing piracy by using the software that I purchased. If I were to lose my keycode and find another one online somewhere, I would be doing VERY criminal piracy. Because my ongoing use of this 13-year-old software is denying Adobe the sale of a new version of their software.

And, in order to provide the best, most up-to-date product possible, Adobe has been selling creative suite as a subscription for 13 years. You get new tools the second they're released. Your software is patched every time your computer syncs. You can use the images in the licensed library and a wide array of brushes and plugins and you can take advantage of storage on Adobe Creative Cloud, which obviates the need for anything larger than a 256GB SSD on your personal machine.

Adobe wants to uphold its brand, they want to put their best foot forward, they want to give me the pinnacle of what they can offer, for only seventy dollars a month.

I've used three different releases of Creative Suite in my time doing layout and design. I started with PS2 and InDesign in high school, then Creative Suite 4 on my college publications, then CS6, one of the last purchases I made with my student ID. The two applications that my high school yearbook used cost something like $300 per license. The full suite ran you about $1200 in 2007. And the student version that I bought as soon as I heard that Adobe was moving to a subscription model was $600. So in about 23 years of using Adobe I've spent just about $100 per year licensing it.

Adobe considers this piracy because it would have cost me about $10,000 to buy creative cloud for the last thirteen years.

Even if I had used it exactly the same way in the intervening thirteen years - generating no additional wealth - Adobe sees it as within their rights to extract payment for me for a service that has not changed tremendously since I last paid for it four presidential administrations ago.

I believe that one could make a solid argument to label this payment model as rent-seeking.

This is, at the moment, one of three ways you can legally use software.

You can use free and open source software, you can use a perpetual software license for the support life of the license, or you can subscribe and pay forever, giving ever more money to Adobe while getting only marginally more in return than they offered for a one-time-fee of $1200 twenty years ago.

Perpetual licenses are getting thinner on the ground and subscription software is everywhere you look.

The Hockey Stick: Part One

If you look at a graph that shows the consumer price index of personal computers from the 80s until now, you are looking at a shocking drop in prices. For essentially my entire life, computers were getting cheaper every year, along with politicians and televisions.

There are plenty of reasons for this (that people have gotten their shit pushed in for protesting), but suffice it to say that manufacturing was cheap and we were cranking out hardware like there was no tomorrow.

Then something funny happened. It happened when I was selling computers for a living, so I saw it happening. The computer prices went up, and they never came back down. Not the way they were before. If you look closer at a graph of the consumer price index of personal computers, zooming in to show the last ten years, the downward slope of the line gets a lot more gradual, and you start to see sustained periods where it's trending up.

You can really see it in six months in mid 2021 (that specific bump was the result of the supply chain crisis caused by Covid and a chip shortage exacerbated by a fire in a Taiwan manufacturing hub).

What you don't see is that in 2019ish the average storage on these computers went from 1TB in the midrange to 256-512GB. If you were looking for a cheaper machine you dropped from around 500GB to around 130GB. 64GB if you were either really cheap or really unlucky.

2019 is when we hit the tipping point on the shift from HDDs to SSDs as the storage standard on a consumer computer. SSDs are much faster and smaller than HDDs, which allows people to game faster and have ever-slimmer machines to slide in their pockets. Booting on an SSD takes a fraction of the time it would take on an HDD. Restarting your computer went from being a several-minute process to something as simple and seamless as unlocking your phone. It's a better technology in many ways, even with the hefty price tag when the tech was new.

But the storage went away. And, even funnier than the hockey stick leveling off - SSDs have dropped in price in the last ten years, but the storage in computers never went back up and the prices never went back down. I'm paying as much now for a laptop with a 256GB SSD as I would have paid for a laptop with a 1TB HDD seven years ago. And a jump from a 256GB SSD to a 512GB SSD costs much, much more proportionately than the jump between a 512GB and a 1TB platter drive cost seven years ago.

But it's not like people had less stuff to store, right? We all carry cameras that take massive, high-clarity photos in our pockets - cameras that can record high-quality video. We're digital hermit crabs, too - when you move to a new computer you aren't just taking what you've got in your hands, you're moving files that have seen half a dozen operating systems and four incompatible file formats. That's not going to fit in the 256GB NVME drive on your laptop, nor on the startlingly-large-but-still-too-small storage on your phone. We've got terabytes of lives drifting behind us, and nowhere to put them.

Who cares, though? Storage is cheap! You can get a 10TB drive for like a hundred bucks if you want to set up your own backup. But why would you want to do that? You get free storage with every service you use.

Other People's Computers

Your 365 subscription comes with a terabyte backup to OneDrive. Your Creative Cloud subscription comes with 100GB of space. Your iCloud only comes with 5GB free but $10 a month isn't that bad for 2TB, that's about what you'd pay for a backup drive the same size, after all, and you never have to worry about hardware failure.

I'm a big Dune fan. In Dune, there's a major plot point that hinges on the idea that control of a thing is defined by the ability to destroy it. Paul can destroy the Spice, therefore he is the only one who can really be considered to own it.

Your photos are psychotropic worm eggs and Google is the Kwisatz Haderach, baby.

You don't have enough storage on your devices to keep all the things that you want to or need to keep. You subscribe to a service that keeps those things for you, and keeps them somewhere handy for you to reach. If your computer gets run over by a tractor your files are safe in the cloud. If your phone falls into the ocean your photos are safe in the cloud. Your life is distributed, secure because it can't be pinned down in one place and popped, many eggs in many baskets.

Question: did you read the ToS?

In 2022, a parent lost access to a significant portion of his digital life because he texted a photo to his child's doctor. Google automatically scanned the image that he sent, determined that it met their definition of CSAM, and locked the father out of his Google account.

What would you lose today if Apple decided you couldn't ever get access to your iCloud account again? Do you have photos of your children? Of your pets? Work you've saved, a book you're writing? A music library?

Where do you have that saved besides your iCloud account?

The Revenge of Windows 8

Like most people, I was not a fan of Windows 8 upon release. Unlike most people, this was because I didn't like the signals it was sending me about the industry, not its terrible interface.

To be fair: I picked up on the industry signals via the terrible interface.

Microsoft wanted Windows 8 to be iOS for the PC. They wanted Microsoft to produce the next iPad. They wanted the Microsoft Tablet to be THE direction in computing. They wanted you to navigate your work on a touchscreen, save your files in apps, and give them all of your data.

To be fair, it only took them ten years after they launched the OS that was supposed to do it.

The modern Windows Desktop is an illusion.

"Complete setup," the unjust OS says. You activate OneDrive. "Complete setup," the unjust OS says, and asks you to enable automatic save on your Excel document.

The modern Windows Desktop is not your computer. If you set the machine up the way that Windows wants you to, almost everything you do on your computer is little more than an interface designed to make you forget that your data is stored and often handled on Microsoft servers. This is common in home environments, but nearly ubiquitous in business environments. And what isn't stored by Microsoft is stored by Google.

Microsoft managed to pull of iCloud and they didn't even have to make a good tablet to do it.

Does not Compute

My office was hesitant to wind down servers. We kept people running local Exchange until the pandemic pushed most of our clients into offsite work and killed the major benefits of the onsite server. We still sold and installed and supported a lot of servers, but with less emphasis in the 2020s than in the 2010s.

One of the things that we really stayed away from, that always struck me as suspicious, was remote compute services.

It's not an intuitive concept if, like me, you grew up cramming more and more resources into home machines over the years. But, if, like a lot of Gen Z, you grew up with school-issued chromebooks and iPads for car rides, it might make a lot of sense to you to think of the device in front of you as a console, and the computer as something somewhere else.

To be perfectly fair: most people do not actually use a ton of computing power on their machines. Gamers do, video editors do, CAD modelers do, but there's no reason that - with a fast internet connection - you couldn't use a cheap machine with very little power to view and manipulate a much more powerful machine remotely.

And if you're not using all that power all the time, there's no reason that you have to access the powerful machine all the time. You can answer emails and do basic browsing on your lightweight office box and pay for time on the forty-core monstrosity with a terabyte of RAM that you use for protein folding.

This could, at least theoretically, save you a lot of money. If you're a college computer lab most of the students are not going to be using a lot of resources all the time, but you need to have resources handy for when the students need a ton of power so you get the Xeon processor on demand.

If you're a business with a huge amount of turnover and a ton of seasonal variation there's no need to buy a whole new desktop with the best specs for your engineers every three years when you could buy something mediocre every seven years and have your engineers compute remotely.

It's not like anything could go wrong there.

Art-I-Ficial

If you are a gamer or are otherwise aware of graphics cards, you're aware that the market for graphics cards crawled up its own ass in 2017 and never came back. This was, initially, because of cryptocurrency and is currently because of the AI boom. Or bubble.

Processing power - graphic or otherwise - feeds the beast. Processors crunch numbers and predict outcomes and consider possibilities and, generally speaking, get things done. For cryptocurrency, this allows the generation of coins in proof of work systems like bitcoin. For "AI" this allows everything. You need a lot of processing power to make LLMs LLM.

Money is, I think we can all agree, a social construct. Money is different in different places, money is not universal across cultures. Money is, like language, something that we depend on. It is, also like language, something that we made up and can change. Money is fake in the way that borders are fake. They didn't exist for the dinosaurs but if you act like they're not real you're going to find yourself having many problems.

Markets - in an economic sense, not in a grocery shopping sense - are fake in a similar way but are subject to a lot more manipulation a whole lot faster than language.

It's pretty obvious that the market for NFTs in 2021 was extremely fake and was being manipulated by a few highly motivated people who knew that they could make a lot of money by getting people to buy into their market. They were correct, and the smart ones got out early and left the rubes holding the bag.

The current state of AI is that there has been a lot of buy-in, but now very large actors are looking around and beginning to wonder if they are holding a bag. Microsoft is looking around and wondering if they're at the top of the roller coaster or if they're late to the party. They have a lot of AI, and they want YOU to have it. Google is in a similar situation, but of the truly Big companies that have bought in to AI, I think it's possible that Microsoft tried to grab the biggest portion of the market that they could, investing both in software development and in hardware production that maybe they're now realizing that the average consumer wants about as much as they wanted a touchscreen desktop in 2013.

The Hockey Stick: Part Two

In 2005, RAM manufacturers paid nearly seven hundred million dollars to the US government as penance for creating an illegal cartel that engaged in price fixing to gouge consumers. In 2017, the manufacturers were sued for doing the same.

If you have looked at the price of RAM in the last six months of 2025, you would not be wrong to ask if another suit will be brought against them soon. It's too much to hope that they might stop engaging in the practice, but you'd at least want someone to raise a fuss.

RAM prices have increased from 200 to 400 percent in the last six months; this is true both for the current generation of memory (DDR5) and the former (DDR4). Memory generations have relatively short life cycles, with new generations getting introduced about every seven-ish years. We were on DDR3 when I entered the industry, and DDR5 took over as the main option on the market in the last year. DDR4 is exiting production, which is at least a partial cause of the price increase as buyers hedge against the future.

But what's going on with DDR5?

Scarcity. Not quite artificial scarcity, but scarcity nonetheless.

In 2022 the price of RAM fell sharply. This was the result of a number of factors - the global economy was something of a shitshow, an unexpected demand for computers in 2020 had an impact on consumer purchases in the years that followed, various companies started producing at higher rates than they had earlier in the pandemic. There was a lot of RAM floating around.

And that, as it turns out, is bad for business.

When a business is used to producing something for $20 and selling it for $40, they don't consider selling it for $30 as "making ten dollars," they think of it as "losing ten dollars" in much the same way that Adobe thinks I'm stealing because I'm using old software instead of buying new software.

RAM producers decided that the price of RAM was too low for them to be as profitable as they wanted to be in 2022, so they made plans to slow production in 2023. That brought the price in line with where they thought it should be, and had the added side effect of ensuring that there wouldn't be a glut of RAM further down the line, contributing to what the Chief Executive of Micron described as "cyclical challenges."

Let's talk about cycles for a moment.

RAM generations move in cycles. At the beginning of the generation the price is high because the tech is new and scarce. As the new generation peaks in price, the old generation falls, and right about that time an even newer new generation is brought to market.

Consumer computer purchases also move in cycles. People know about how much life they get out of a machine so they will generally replace their machines on a pretty reliable cycle. There are some variations for the introduction of new tech, which might spur some people to buy early, but new tech is also released on a pretty predictable cycle. That means, in the absence of freak global economic instability and disruptive technology, the market for consumer hardware purchases is pretty predictable.

It's a shame we had a global pandemic directly between the emergence of two disruptive technologies attempting to gobble up massive portions of the worldwide tech market.

What I am getting at here is that RAM producers' unwillingness to tolerate a temporary dip in profits that directly resulted from a market recovering from supply chain upheaval and a planetary financial shock has led to a reduced supply of RAM stocks available in late 2025.

Late 2025 is also when OpenAI signed an agreement with two manufacturers to purchase 40% of the world's RAM production capacity. And when a third manufacturer announced that they would be closing their consumer division to focus on enterprise production.

Which is why consumer RAM prices at the end of 2025 are exploding skyward.

And, because the people who produce chips for RAM are the same people who produce chips for SSDs, the prices on personal computer storage aren't coming down any time soon.

Tinfoil Tricorner

But what's the point? Am I making the argument that AI firms, hardware manufacturers, and software producers are colluding in an unwholesome alliance to manipulate the personal computer landscape into a smoking wasteland where you use your cheaply-made-but-over-priced cellphone to access a virtual machine in a datacenter to run your subscription software while your data is stored on someone else's server and endlessly consumed to feed ever-more-marginally-useful LLMs?

No. That's not really what I think is going on here. I don't think we're in an "optimize the universe for paperclip production" kind of scenario. I think that's giving these dipshits too much credit.

I think hardware manufacturers and software producers and AI companies don't care all that much about consumers and don't care what they do to the market tomorrow as long as they're making money today. I think their goal is to reduce costs and raise prices and capture the entire market, which is everyone, even people who don't want to be in the market.

They all want to create inelastic demand so they can raise their prices forever.

Professional page designers can't use Scribus, they have to pay $23-$70 per month for the privilege of getting fucked by Adobe.

It's already essentially impossible to function without a phone in the modern world, now it's going to be more expensive and less functional.

Nobody wants anywhere near as much AI as is being produced but you're going to swallow it because there's nowhere to get away from it. Shut up and eat your CoPilot processor there are kids in the 90s who would have killed for Candy Crush Saga Five.

Always a Renter, never an Owner

I am writing from the United States, so please consider that my perspective here is skewed by the fact that this place is garbage.

The housing market is fucked and a huge percentage of people are unable to purchase homes, instead spending massive portions of their income on extremely high rents.

To get a job that might cover a one-bedroom apartment or a mortgage in the middle of nowhere, you have to get a college education, which is going to cost you anywhere from one to twenty years of a poverty wage if you manage to pay for it without taking out a loan. If you do take out a loan, you will be paying for your student debt for the rest of your life.

When you get your job that pays enough for your one bedroom apartment, you are going to need a way to get there, and because public transit is terrible you're probably (statistically) going to drive. If you want a reliable car, you're looking at a loan that costs at least as much as your college education that you will be paying for a minimum of five years; modern cars are turning up with shocking issues at that age so make sure to get the extended warranty. This, on top of your rent and your student loans, will likely consume half of your income.

Another large portion of your income will either be invisibly subtracted from your paycheck in the form of a group healthcare plan or will be very noticeably paid out of pocket. If you quit your job, you will not be able to afford this, so you have to stay in your job so that you're not taking the chance of risking permanent poverty every time you walk out your front door. Your healthcare isn't YOUR healthcare, you pay for the privilege of having a doctor order your lifesaving meds or you die. And then you pay a copay on your meds and the visit to the doctor.

After all of that, whatever is left of your income can be put toward food and relaxation. Relaxation often comes in the form of monthly subscriptions to movies you don't own, music you don't own, games you don't own, or gambling on sports. Food can also be something you don't own if you're broke enough, in which case it becomes credit card debt.

Your computer is financed. Your phone is leased. Your music is a subscription.

The only thing that is perpetual are the payments.

You will rent everything, and you will hate it.

Vienna

I am not precisely suggesting that we nationalize education, housing, healthcare, and the tech sector.

I'm just sort of vaguely gesturing at it.

The problem with Auken's essay, as I stated earlier, is that it snips the Microsofts and the Adobes and the Microns out of the picture. It is true that Microsoft wants you to own nothing and be happy, it is true that Microsoft wants you to have no privacy, it is true that Microsoft wants you to call for anything you need when you need it, the issue is that Microsoft wants you to ask Microsoft to provide it and they want you to pay. In our world Auken's city is not Our city, it is a company town.

We need to reckon with that if we want to have the kind of world where you don't have to own your house or fear homelessness.

It's the kind of thing that other people and other places have found a way to handle, and it makes some sense that the initial essay was written from the perspective of a person who lives in a country with at least a marginally functional social welfare state. Denmark is certainly much more of Our country to Auken than the US is Our country to me.

But we live in a global economy. Microsoft is sold in Denmark and California, three producers make the majority of the RAM on the planet, and tech is dense with anti-competitive, anti-consumer practices. If we are not going to nationalize Adobe (we should nationalize Adobe. C'mon. It would be funny) we need to do something else.

RTFM

Hardware is going to suck for a while. I'm not a gamer, and I don't do any heavy computing so I am going to be less impacted than people who actually need high end equipment, but we're all going to end up paying for the choices that the industry leaders have made. We're paying in energy prices, we're paying in hardware costs, we're literally paying in subscription fees.

I am tired of giving a single fuck about Bill Gates and I'm tired of giving him any money.

Not to be entirely predictable, but you should probably install Linux.

I have been working in the tech industry for fourteen years. I have seen a lot of changes to how people approach personal computing and I think I have reached the official curmudgeon stage. Kids these days need to get off their dang phones and build a desktop.

That may sound wildly out of line with the rest of what I've written here - 4800 words in and I'm telling you to buy computer hardware? Well. No. Not exactly.

I'm telling you that the vast majority of computer owners use their machines as a word processor and youtube display system and I'm telling you that you can accomplish that very effectively on a ten year old machine from Ebay running Linux Mint with LibreOffice and Firefox.

I think the industry is fucked and I don't think it's particularly likely to unfuck itself any time soon and it is definitely not going to unfuck itself if it has 100% market capture, so the best thing you can do is to become unmarketable.

If you know how to set up a NAS from secondhand parts, you don't have to buy cloud storage from Apple. If you know how to use a thrift store desktop to set up a PLEX server and how to share movies on a thumbdrive, you become immune to netflix. If the global market for DDR5 quadruples in price you can be in your lane, thriving and moisturized with your 32GB DDR3 and a stripped-down OS.

Computers are actually pretty easy to work on. A desktop system is about as complicated to assemble as a set of legos and installing Linux is easier than changing the color settings on a smart TV. Used computers are so cheap that people will literally pay you to throw them away, and there is a constant churn of devices that people consider ewaste that will make a perfectly functional non-microsoft, non-apple, non-cloud device. It won't run games very well, and you probably can't use it for a ton of video editing, but if you need someplace to do budget spreadsheets and you don't want to give Microsoft your money and you don't want to give Google your data and you don't want AI built in to the hardware and the operating system, there is a better way than a 365 subscription and a tablet.

This is not the End

I mean, this is the end of this essay, but this is not the end of this problem.

This is not the last time that a tech company or cartel of manufacturers or an AI conglomerate will do something infuriating that fucks up the system for the rest of us.

They get away with it because of consumer compliance. People buy what they're selling.

You could be one less person buying their bullshit.

You deserve better than what they want to sell you, and you have the ability to do better for yourself than they would for you.

They want you to rent everything, and be happy.

I want you to own something, and be proud.

Safety, ethics, and sustainability are all a part of urban gardening and foraging. I'm sorry that means you need to do homework before you can do anything, I know that sounds lame. But life is complicated.

Daily reminder: Leafy greens like kales uptake all those delicious heavy metals in urban soils like lead and cadmium.

Don’t eat sidewalk-crack kale.

Here's some cool references from the EPA on safe urban gardening:

REUSING POTENTIALLY CONTAMINATED LANDSCAPES: Growing Gardens in Urban Soils